Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?
Hi,
At Thu, 17 Jan 2002 13:52:41 -0500,
Glenn Maynard wrote:
> cat /etc/locale.alias
>
> doesn't and can't support that tag. Since I'm on a UTF-8 terminal, I
> see garbage in those aliases. This shouldn't happen in system-supplied
> textual configuration files.
Agree. And, (at least) until everyone will come to use UTF-8,
I can say "Since I'm on an EUC-JP terminal, I see garbage in
those aliases." Please substitute EUC-JP into any favorite
encoding.
> Not everyone uses Emacs. (Especially as a dropin for /bin/cat. :)
Right. Even if everyone uses Emacs, Emacs is not the only software
they use.
> > > I propose that ISO-8859-1 version of /etc/locale.alias to be
> > > prepared in /usr/share/doc/locales/examples/ directory. The
> > > manpage can have an instruction how to use the file. The
> > > default /etc/locale.alias should not contain ISO-8859-1 locale
> > > names.
>
> I wouldn't want to encourage ISO-8859-1 in it at all, so I'd rather not
> see that. Examples should show *good* usage; this would be a poor
> example.
I basically agree with you. I want to fully agree with you.
However, Alaster says that there are people who need such
illegal ISO-8859-1 locale names for compatibility... This
is why I suggested to disable ISO-8859-1 locale names in default
and prepare a way and instruction to enable these illegal locale
names by hand. I agree that the cleanest way is to disable
such illegal ISO-8859-1 locale names at all.
However, ISO-8859-1 locale names are _illegal_. It is against
the basic concept of "locale" mechanism. Someone who want to
use such illegal locale names should be able to explain why they
are really needed.
> The program (or underlying libraries) could reasonably parse /etc/aliases as
> ASCII; if any conversions are done, that would probably just return
> error.
Yes. In future, we might come to accept UTF-8 for this purpose,
but not now.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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